The Red Wheelbarrow
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The Red Wheelbarrow is a poem by and often considered the masterwork of American 20th-century writer William Carlos Williams. The 1923 poem exemplifies the Imagist-influenced philosophy of “no ideas but in things”. This provides another layer of meaning beneath the surface reading. The style of the poem forgoes traditional British stress patterns to create a typical “American” image.[1]
The subject matter of The Red Wheelbarrow is what makes it the most distinctive and important. He lifts a brazier to an artistic level, exemplifying the importance of the ordinary; as he says, a poem “must be real, not 'realism', but reality itself." In this way, it holds more in common with the haiku of Bashō than with the verse of T. S. Eliot.[original research?]
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[edit] Composition and publication
The pictorial style in which the poem is written owes much to the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and the precisionist style of Charles Sheeler, an American photographer-painter whom Williams met shortly before composing the poem.[2] The poem represents an early stage in Williams' evolution as a poet. It focuses on the objective representation of an object, in line with the Imagist philosophy that was only ten years old at the time of the poem's publication. Williams' later works sacrifice some of this objective clarity in order to personalize the image for the reader. This is clearly illustrated in the poet's longest piece, Paterson, the first book of which was published in 1942. In this later work, Williams writes a prose-like monologue, which stands in stark contrast to the brief, haiku-like form of The Red Wheelbarrow.[3]
The Red Wheelbarrow was originally published in Williams' 1923 anthology of mixed poetry and prose titled Spring and All. It was originally simply titled "XXII", denoting its place within the anthology. Referring to the poem as "The Red Wheelbarrow" has been frowned upon by some critics, including Neil Easterbrook, who said that it gives the text "a specifically different frame" than that which Williams originally intended. The poem is removed from its place in the anthology, and takes on a different meaning on its own.[4]
[edit] Text
- So much depends
upon
- a red wheel
barrow
- glazed with rain
water
- beside the white
chickens
[edit] Analysis
[edit] Structure
The poem has a distinct pattern, with alternating lines of two and one stressed syllables. The work seems to attempt to reach a specific combination of stresses, but purposely misses each time. In the table below, the desired combination would be represented as uMuS/Mu. This relates to Williams' basic doctrine that by examining an object in all of its immediacy, we can come into contact with something universal. There is a universal order to be found in the poem, but the individual lines never reach it. Rather, the particularity of each line gestures toward the underlying universal pattern.[5]
| Line | Text | Stress pattern | Syllables |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | so much depends | uMuS | 4 |
| 2 | upon | uM | 2 |
| 3 | a red wheel | uM S | 3 |
| 4 | barrow | Mu | 2 |
| 5 | glazed with rain | MuS | 3 |
| 6 | water | Mu | 2 |
| 7 | beside the white | uMuS | 4 |
| 8 | chickens | Su | 2 |
key:
u: unstressed syllable
S: stressed syllable
M: medium stressed syllable
[edit] Content
The Red Wheelbarrow represents Williams' desire to raise the individual "to some approximate co-extension with the universe...to refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live". He wanted to "escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate work from reality". The first line of the poem is open-ended. Sandra K. Stanley wrote that it represents a "demand that the reader confront the text".[7][8]
Much attention has been given to the word "glazed" in the fifth line of the poem. It is the only word in the poem that can be said to carry an aesthetic meaning.[9] The French literary critic and theorist Michael Riffaterre said that this word is "the real agent of the poem's efficacy", because it transforms the wheelbarrow into an object of aesthetic contemplation.[10]
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ Gates, Rosemary L. (1987). "Forging an American Poetry from Speech Rhythms: Williams after Whitman". Poetics Today (Duke University Press) 8 (3/4): 503–527. doi:. ISSN 03335372. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772565. Retrieved on 2008-07-20.
- ^ Hefferman, James A. W. (1991). "Ekphrasis and Representation". New Literary History 22 (2): 297–316. doi:. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0028-6087%28199121%2922%3A2%3C297%3AEAR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5.
- ^ Cho, Hyun-Young (2003). "The Progression of William Carlos Williams’ Use of Imagery" (PDF). Writing for a Real World 4: 62–69. http://www.usfca.edu/rhetcomp/journal/cho2003.pdf.
- ^ Easterbrook, Neil (1994). ""Somehow Disturbed at the Core": Words and Things in William Carlos Williams". South Central Review 11 (3): 25. doi:. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0743-6831%28199423%2911%3A3%3C25%3A%22DATCW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K.
- ^ Gee, James Paul (1985). "The Structure of Perception in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams: A Stylistic Analysis". Poetics Today 6 (3): 375. doi:. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0333-5372%281985%296%3A3%3C375%3ATSOPIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0.
- ^ adapted from Gee (1985). S represents strong stress on a syllable, M moderate stress, and u little or no stress.
- ^ Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto (Summer, 1990). "The Link between Williams and Zukofsky". Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press) 17 (1): 55–56. ISSN 0022281X. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831402. Retrieved on 2008-07-20.
- ^ Beach, Christopher (2003). The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge University Press. pp. 100.
- ^ Beach (2003), p. 100
- ^ Halter, Peter (1994). The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge University Press. pp. 179.
